Advisory: Before you go to see what it's all about...

I'd like to save you time if you're considering a trip to Direct Buy (any city, any state). When you call the number on the ad, an agent wants to set up an appointment. The agent makes it sound imperative that you show up (which is the polite thing to do on your part), but the agent makes it sound as if it's a serious obligation, that it's somehow exclusive. It's not. They handle small groups of visitors at a time, so they want to make sure all the seats are full for the presentation. When you walk in, a sales "agent" greets you, you wait for everyone to show up, and then you are seated in a room in front of a TV. There, you are shown all of the fabulous products available through Direct Buy. Then the sales agent talks about how fabulous the products are, and starts showing you the savings--which are an impressive 60-75 percent off retail--you, as a member, can get in on. At that point, each visitor is taken to a separate seating area. As you enjoy a cold beverage, the agent asks you what kinds of things you want to buy. The agent pulls giant catalogs and you begin to look up the things on your wish list, so you can see the savings you could reap with your membership. During the entire process, the agent is pumping you up with reinforcing statements: "Isn't this great? Wouldn't YOU like to pay 75% off retail? I bet you can't WAIT to begin..." When you're sick of all the bla bla bla, you ask, "What's the bottom line here? The lowest membership is more than $3,000 a year. So here's the deal: Direct Buy is not a showroom full of all the stuff you see in the TV ads. They have flooring and fabric. That's it. If you want to save on, for example, a dining room set, you have to go shop retail stores find what you want, and then come to Direct Buy to look in their catalogs to see whether it's available through them. That's how you save money. If you are building or completely remodeling a home, or completly furnishing a home in a year, a $5,000 membership would be worth it because you're already in the process of spending a great deal of money. If you're not, you have to determine whether you're savings would offset the cost of the membership, because you're giving them more than $3,000 in order to save two or three times that. The fact that they're luring people in with the 60-75% savings is a crock, because they don't calculate the cost of the membership into that. And believe me, the catalogs are enormous, and each item is on a tiny line on a page among thousands of pages. Even if I had been planning on spending $50,000 in a year, there's no way I would go from retailer to retailer shopping, and then haul my ass to Direct Buy to look through a 4-inch binder to find out whether Direct Buy had an agreement with the manufacturer. Make no mistake about it, you are on your own, and nothing is electronic--there's no search feature. What pissed me off was that when I called for information I made it clear I was only in the market for small household items (like a KitchenAid stand mixer, a TV-media cabinet) and wouldn't be interested in anything else. The woman on the phone ignored this completely and I wasted an entire afternoon to find out that the lowest membership was more than $3,000 a year. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of an Amway presentation I stumbled upon at a neighbor's. Direct Buy uses the same technique of baiting you with what you can OWN, what dreams you can fulfill, dragging you around endlessly and resisting every plea to be told how much it will cost you for a membership. Even though I was persistent, in retrospect, I should have been a [***] and said: If you don't tell me how much the membership cost I'm leaving. And that's all I have to say about that.